Can Data Center Become Water Self-Sufficient?

To curtail data centers’ huge cooling power consumption and water demand (for cooling), air-side economizer has been increasingly adopted to cool down servers. Recently, another sustainability practice, rainwater harvesting, has also seen a growing adoption in data centers, potentially leading to water self-sufficiency without connecting to water utilities to supply cooling water. Nonetheless, various factors, e.g., unpredictable rain falls and limitations on water harvesting area, make water self-sufficiency challenging. In this paper, we present a first-of-its-kind study to evaluate whether it is feasible to achieve water self-sufficiency in data centers. We find that although water self-sufficiency depends on noncontrollable factors such as weather; improving power proportionality (via power management) and increasing water tank size will increase the feasibility, relieving the requirement on water harvesting area and making water self-sufficiency a reality in different locations.